Baker Artist Portfolios

Narratives teach us who we are in the world and how to relate to each other. But what happens when the narratives we are taught omit, obscure, or shame the embodied realities we experience? Neurologically humans learn to perceive through categorization. What happens if someone falls between the cracks of communal categories? Our work reaches from those liminal spaces seeking moments of empathetic bridge building and connection.

Although we begin with digital images, we choose to relinquish the control that the digital typically confers by embracing the limitations and variables of the analog cyanotype process. This enables moments of surprise and creative encounter. The choice to see those limitations as enhancing rather than frustrating the creative process challenges the exploitative lens of “overcoming” through which the limits of our bodies and our planet are so often viewed. Not only does this produce a unique visual vocabulary within figurative photography, the communal nature of the printing process provides a rhythm of art making that is conducive to bodies working within chronic illness.

Artist Bio:

The Danaid Collaboration (DanaidX) is a Baltimore based duo formed by Hope Brooks and Angela Yarian. Yarian spent 10 years unable to make work because of a debilitating illness, despite holding a degree in art. Likewise, Brooks, a trans woman, photographer and data engineer, also wrestles with her own chronic pain issues. Emerging from a quest to make art from a place that acknowledges present realities, their collaboration resists trying to be more abled-bodies than they are. Through an attentive, slow-moving method of making cyanotypes, they embrace limitations as a fertile ground for creative work, and as a possibility for expanding the dialogue on what constitutes a successful art practice and life. DanaidX’s name comes from the Greek myth about the danaid sisters, cursed by the gods to endlessly fill a cistern riddled with holes. Chronic illness makes simple tasks into broken cisterns. DanaidX asks: what if we were able to plug those holes for each other?